Apple begins shipping first iMac Pro orders

Apple's new premium, professional grade all-in-one desktop, the iMac Pro, is now shipping to customers, though deliveries from China are not expected to arrive before Christmas.

Early iMac Pro adopters were informed Thursday morning that their new system is now on its way. Orders seen by AppleInsider are estimated to arrive on Dec. 28 via UPS.

Currently, the $4,999-and-up systems are in Shanghai, where they are awaiting "final release" from a clearing agency.

Reports have suggested that some iMac Pro units could show up in Apple's own retail stores this week. However, no inventory was listed available at the company's biggest stores as of Thursday.

The new 27-inch iMac Pro with Retina 5K display is intended for high-end demands, featuring a base configuration with an 8-core processor running at 3.2 gigahertz, 32 gigabytes of ECC DDR4 2666 RAM, a Vega 56 GPU with 8 gigabytes of VRAM, and a terabyte of flash storage. More powerful configurations, including an 18-core CPU model, ship in 2018.

AppleInsider partners Adorama and B&H, both Apple authorized resellers, are currently taking pre-orders for the iMac Pro with no sales tax charged on purchases shipped outside New York and New Jersey, potentially saving customers between $400 and $1,055. A full list of deals can be found in our iMac Pro Price Guide.

12 Comments

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

About 6 years ago

Already shipping? Demand must be non-existent. FAIL. And yes, I am a professional analyst. /s

macxpress 5910 comments · 16 Years

Boy would I love to have one of these. I have absolutely no use for it, but I'd still love to have one, even the standard $4999 config is enough for me. Has anyone seen one in the Apple Retail Store yet? I think I read somewhere that they were going to be in stores as a demo Mac this week.

gmgravytrain 884 comments · 8 Years

One of the Youtubers who received a 10-core iMac Pro bench-marked it against a fully customized-to-order iMac that cost about $5200 and the 10-core iMac Pro smoked it (of course). The 10-core iMac Pro cost $5800 but the base iMac Pro would have also beaten the fully CTO iMac. I'd definitely rather buy a base model iMac Pro rather than a fully CTO iMac.

lkrupp said:

Already shipping? Demand must be non-existent. FAIL. And yes, I am a professional analyst. /s

It's weird, though. Why would Apple build another computer that no one wanted after seeing what happened with the "trashcan" Mac Pro? Does that even make any sort of sense? Why would Apple deliberately try to lose sales to competitors? I'm rather stupid, and even I would have learned my lesson about designing a computer that no one wants. I'm not sure why EVERYONE believes that sales will be non-existent for the iMac Pro. I realize you're expressing sarcasm but so many others actually believe this iMac Pro is such a waste. I know very little about professional workstations so I'd be a poor judge of what's good and what isn't. I only know that if I bought one, I could easily enjoy it for five years. Why everyone believes it's a fail before it even gets into the hands of users, is just crazy. Even the 10-core model looks to be great for editing and rendering videos for even the most demanding Youtubers. The 18-core model should be insane. Jeez, 36 threads of insane.

thedba 790 comments · 12 Years

macxpress said:

Boy would I love to have one of these. I have absolutely no use for it, but I'd still love to have one, even the standard $4999 config is enough for me. Has anyone seen one in the Apple Retail Store yet? I think I read somewhere that they were going to be in stores as a demo Mac this week.

I took a trip to a nearby Apple store last weekend hoping to see one. Unfortunately for me they hadn't arrived yet.
I'd love to have one too, unfortunately I can not justify such a cost for what I do.